Mexico, the Latin North American Nation: A Conversation with
Carlos Rico Ferrat

Carlos Rico Ferrat was interviewed at his home outside Mexico City in April 1998. I edited a transcript of the interview and invited him to make corrections and changes in December 1998 and sent a second revision in July 1999. He sent a revision of that revision in July 1999.	1
DAVID THELEN
CARLOS RICO FERRAT:We are rethinking part of our own national history in terms of its basic referents. At the same time that Mexico is, of course, a Latin American nation—a deeply rooted historical, cultural, and linguistic concept—its history has been shaped, in good measure, by its geographical location in North America. Present political and intellectual debates in the country reveal the complexity of that double identity: a Latin North American nation. We emphasize that we come from a similar colonial background and have a common history with the rest of Latin America that defines our national being. At the same time, we cannot deny the fact that we are also North American and that part of our history, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has to do with developments that took place in the rest of North America. These two different notions interact as we try to come to terms with what we are now.	2
The clearest way to see this is if you look, for example, at the development of such things as communications in Mexico. During the colonial era, when we had our basic external referent in Spain, a referent that we shared with the rest of Latin America, most of our communications went from the rest of Mexico to the center of Mexico, then from there to Veracruz, and then from Veracruz to Europe, because of the monopoly of trade that Spain had developed. If you start traveling today in Mexico, however, you would see that the main railroads and the main roads go north. They no longer go east to the coast. In the late nineteenth century Mexican railroad networks were in good measure outgrowths of the United States railroads and communication systems that were being built at that time. You look at the kind of railroad tracks that we had at that time, and you will see that it is very hard to even understand key developments in the Mexican Revolution without understanding that almost physical linkage to the United States.	3
It is, in fact, very hard to understand the history of Mexico in the last twenty years without immediate reference to whatever was happening in the United States economy. Mexico is a Latin American nation, as Latin as any South American nation; Mexico is also the one Latin American nation located in North America. It shares the economic and social history of what came to be the giant of the Western world. That's what makes trying to understand where Mexico is at this point so difficult.	4
DAVID THELEN:Earlier you said something striking about the 1950s and 1960s: that the Mexican government set out to construct Mexico as a Latin American nation, while the Mexican people connected Mexico to the United States.	5
CRF:I was trying to point out the role of politics, on the one hand, and the market, on the other, in building the so-called decision to establish NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. And I say "so-called decision" because, by the time we decided to negotiate NAFTA, the process of the integration of the Mexican economy into the United States economy was fairly well advanced. And that was basically a result of the market.	. . .